Where To Put Our Hands

I know it's been a long time. I wonder if anyone will still want to read this blog. But, like a good book, I'm hoping that though lives change and people change, fundamentally things remain the same, well-worn, predictable, and solid. That just because time has passed doesn't mean we-or should I say I-can't pick up where we left off, dust ourselves off, and try again. Such is life, and so I will try to continue my project to read all the fiction books I can, in alphabetical order.

The title of the post has a lot to do with the book I'm reading now, called "A Girl Made of Dust", by Nathalie Abi-Ezzi. I'm about a quarter way through this book, and so far it's a book about a Christian family living in Lebanon during the war, told from the point of view of eight year old Ruba. Ruba's mother is dissatisfied with her life, exasperated by a husband who seems to have become possessed, withdrawn, and unable to function. He won't even get up in the morning to open the family shop, and Ruba's mother is worried about the family income. Ruba talks about how a nearby witch must have put a spell on her father to weaken him, and in the chapter I just finished, she starts to conspire a plan to cure him, using the "evil eye", a glass eye she found outside and keeps in her pocket. Ruba also lives with her grandmother Teta, and her older brother Naji. One day her uncle comes to town, and he seems to stir things up. There is emotional but unnamed tension between the father and the uncle, and a sort of loose sexual tension between the uncle and his sister-in-law, but all of this still remains somewhat ambiguous.

In fact, it's not even the plot that is really keeping my interest right now, as I have read multiple books about war and children, families, suffering, religion. It's almost as if the plot doesn't matter, the secret about the father is irrelevant, but what is rather special about this book so far is the way it showcases everyday fears, and the smaller minute acts in life, the way in which the slightest of actions, like a hummingbird's wings beating, can convey so much heaviness in the heart.

Mami (the mother) is always trying to find something to do with her hands. She is constantly smoothing, cleaning, flitting about. It's an act of nerves, of discontent, and one I think we all know. The author writes, "'Don't bother her,' Naji said to me after lunch, but it was hard not to watch. She must have cleaned every tile in the kitchen: every white one, every blue one, and the ugly spaces where there were no tiles any longer. She had to know every wall and surface and crack in the house, I thought, as I hopped around on one foot. She must know the tassels at the edges of the living room carpet, which was really an island you couldn't step off barefoot or you'd fall into the cold sea of tiles; she must know the swirls in the peach-colored lampshade, which looked like a shell and which she said came from Manila but was really from a shop on the high road, only no one wanted to tell her; and she must know that the metal coat hook on the wall was bent from the weight of Papi's heavy winter coat." This is such an innocent viewpoint of the world, told from such an eight year old, and yet the complete sadness of Mami can be felt so strongly, the way she cleans to forget, but can't help but know all the little secrets, the details, she is undoubtedly trying to forget. Ruba is hopping about, making up stories about the rug as an island, so typical of children in the face of adulthood pain. And yet she understands, she sees her mother moving about, she can read the distraction, the suffering, the unsaid.

I love this passage, and other ones the author writes where plot is not the point: the point is what we do with our hands, the corners of our mouths, the tips of our fingers and toes. The body betrays our mind, always, and we are left moving about in vain, going through the motions of life, cleaning, sorting, but unable to escape our own selves, our own islands that imprison us. But maybe, then, it is only our own selves who can set us free.

I hope to blog more regularly. It will be something to do with my hands, and maybe it will be something you do with your eyes, reading, like a book, the way pages and stories get put away, but still remain there, on the shelf, unchanged.